Dance Ethnography and The Limits of Representation Author(s) : Randy Martin Source: Social Text, No. 33 (1992), Pp. 103-123 Published By: Duke University Press Accessed: 15-10-2019 16:41 UTC

Dance Ethnography and the Limits of Representation
Author(s): Randy Martin

Source: Social Text, No. 33 (1992), pp. 103-123
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/466436
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Dance Ethnography and the Limits of Representation
Randy Martin
The distance between representation and object has engaged the intellectual
energies of those writing on dance as a kind of bricolage where the dance event
appears to occasion writerly structure. These energies have been occupied in
writing on other objects by a theory that simulates the complexity of the object
in the writing itself. The traces of participation, the work an audience does to
create a sense of the object as it is presented to them, are nowhere to be found
in the standard means of representation and documentation and, as such, are
absent from the ways in which history is conventionally conceived.
Reception of dance, especially of the kinds of Western concert dance that
will provide the focus for this essay, is realized only in the particular perfor-
mance event. The dancers constitute themselves in anticipation of perfor-
mance. This anticipation bears the anxiety of uncertainty, of something that
can be completed only through its communication. The performance is the
execution of an idea by dancers whose work proceeds in expectation of an
audience that is itself only constituted through performance. The audience has
no identity as audience prior to and apart from the performative agency which
has occasioned it. As such, the audience is intrinsically "unstable," both in
terms of its own presence and in its ability to occasion and then disrupt the
very anxiety of performance. At the same time, it is the work that the audience
does, the participation that it lends to performance to make the latter possible
that is irrecuperable to representation. It is, like the dance activity itself, an
untranslatable object. But unlike dancing, forms of representation rarely make
an effort to recognize audience participation, which springs from this disrup-
tive potential, itself an indeterminacy of representation internal to the perfor-
mance. So if writing and documentation cannot recuperate the traces of partic-
ipation found in performance, minimally they can recognize the disruptive
effects of the work of participation lost to representation.
The shift in perspective to participation rather than representation as sug-
gested by the conceptual challenges posed by dance, here understood as the
particularization of the performer-audience relation, has an import beyond
dance writing. This perspective simulates a relation of performer and audience
where the activity of performers (the artistic object of performance) puts into
operation the notion of "agency," and where the audience suggests a mobilized
critical presence such as that implicit in radical notions of "history."'
104 Dance Ethnography and the Limits of Representation
This distinction points to a conception of history which joins his

ect-as the formation of an identity-and historical possibility-
ity for continued mobilization; and as such focuses on the moment
in relation to the object. The full appreciation of the place of rece
unstable audience, has the potential to extend an understanding of
I claim that the procedure most appropriate to explore the relatio
and history simulated in performance is ethnographic. Ethno
appropriate method for appreciating the disruptive presence that d
sentation and its object. Ethnography conveys through language th
graphic procedure is radically different from what it looks at. Et
an activity of textual appropriation of difference that rests upon a
appropriation through colonial contact. Hence, while ethnography
representation, with sufficient methodological reflection, it point
lost to representation just as does the performer-audience relation
A revisionist ethnography has appeared in the last ten years that
of what it sees as the loss of the exotic, seeks to locate its act
within representation as a rhetorical reflection of writing.2 Withou
tinizing the authority of representation, calling into question the d
cultural object, and asserting the partiality of truth as both "com
incomplete" all render ethnographic practice more fully reflexive
Yet this consciousness of self can come at the expense of a comp
of what that self appropriates and what lies beyond that appropriat
cern is that the unruly engagement with difference which curren
Western culture must be recognized if what reconstituted colo
now do to the world is to be kept alive to analysis.3 The self-awar
by revisionist ethnography over the objectivistic conventions of i
threatens to be recuperated wholly within the politics of writing p
I would instead privilege a strategy made intelligible through an
dance that would reaffirm and relocate the exotic within ethnogr
sentation, precisely that of the unstable audience. The ethnogr
strategy consists in writing that fully displays the disruptive pote
which it represents in analysis. Here the ethnographic field is neith
ferentiated space of the Other visited by the ethnographer or
space of representation in which an ethnographer writes. It is
dance performance, a relation of forces joined in tension yet fund
unlike one another. By identifying such tensions, fieldwork b
problematic, more contingent, and more susceptible to contention
mation, because it is constituted by difference rather than merel
difference.
In this regard, ethnographic writing identifies politics where there was

thought to be none. This is not to say that one should expect to hear more from
a given audience at a dance concert; clearly that would take some other event,
tied to a sustained mobilization. But if analysis is to understand what keeps
Randy Martin 105
any audience coming

lization irrespective o
dynamics of perform
Difference hithert
within the account o
is not what lies beyon
so, appears as a mom
the (colonial) contex
revisionary ethnogra
based ethnographic pr
out it being absorbed
the mobilized presen
to the agency of the
dancing, or of ethnog
Such a conception of
tions, from television
to those against it.
begin with the highl
of audience refuses t
In what follows, I w
the issues raised thus
performance ethnogr
tion of theater that
Jowitt's Time and th
history and Susan F
porary American Da
porary theory to da
study of dance. Dem
mental dance at Juds
as an analytic frame a
bert Blau's The Aud
that of the performer
Representing the Object

Capture and Chronicle
A kind of formalism
review. Indeed, a rev
as an evaluation of it
a representation of sp
tion is made to appea
reflexive, it is not u
some explicit problem
gests controversy, or a question for the work's sources or condition

tion. Yet the dance review's presentation of its material as a simula
performance suggests a relation of universal powers of appropriatio
ticular event, with critical attitude being tied not to evaluation but
objective orientation to the object. The reviewer's authority to r
translated into any viewer's capacity to relate experience of the obj
there. Let me tell you how it was"). Given the instability of the tra
dance performance, such claims become all the more tenuous.
For twenty years Deborah Jowitt, lead dance critic for the Village
been most strongly associated with this nonevaluative, documentary
dance criticism. Undoubtedly, when documentation as a simulation
mance becomes a critical trope, one is tempted to overlook the critic
positions. In return for this loss, each dance is given an originar
freshness in performance that gives the critic's review the mark o
and the performance that of thing-in-itself. Jowitt voices her con
those who practice her craft "that in our anxiety to capture and ch
notoriously ephemeral art we do it an inadvertent disservice: w
intently on it that we sever it from the culture that spawned it an
serves" (7). It is no small irony then that she produces a representati
egy that extends precisely the model of formalist dance critici
helped develop to a culturally informed account of the history of d
intends.
Despite her professed sensitivity to context, she produces nothing to offset

the context, denying "anxiety to capture and chronicle" (a phrase that could
have been lifted right from Columbus's diaries), that she takes as the
reviewer's burden. She speaks of her book's method as an extension of writing
criticism to writing history, where her ability to deny her own cultural links to
what she observes enables her to account for the cultural relations that gener-
ated Western concert dancing:
A dance critic, attending performances night after night, devises

strategies for keeping eye and mind fresh. Some years ago, no
doubt influenced by a long-standing addiction to National Geo-
graphic, I began to find it useful, on occasion, to blot out all expec-
tations based on knowledge of styles or techniques. Instead I imag-
ined myself an anthropologist skulking in ambush, observing the
activities of members of a hitherto undiscovered tribe-trying to
discern their customs and social hierarchy before I stepped out of
the bushes and made myself known to them.
The game, idly begun, eventually generated this book. The

approach turned out to have variants that were applicable to the
study of the past. (7)
Her gesture to anthropology has, as she sees it, tremendous meaning for the
method and orientation of her book, Time and the Dancing Image. Not only
Randy Martin 107
does the span of tim

from the middle of t
persistent reaching f
the horizon just bey
explicit about this re
entalism"-as constitut
in terms that can sh
episteme, she places
something others ch
The play of desire an
and Jowitt attempts
she seems to redouble some of these relations in her historical account. The
very devices of proscenium presentation construct a spectacle of a world dis-

tant in time and space that is made intimate through a special mode of visua
conquest where the virtuosic efforts of a female dancer are offered for the pr
vate pleasures of a male consort.
Embedded in the colonization offered by Romantic ballets such as La sy
phide, of Bournonville or Taglioni, and Coralli and Perrot's Giselle, are re
tions of gender, race, and class made innocent and unencumbered by worldly
power through amorous trysts and metaphysical interventions. Each of these
categories, however, are paradoxical within the Romantic ballet. The ethereal
sylph typically occupies more real time on stage than the male "hero" w
pursues her and to whom she is invariably appropriated; and she occupie
more real space than her role in narrative seemed to entail: presumabl
because she was, Jowitt says, to be "substantial enough to play a shadow" (47
The prima ballerina as sylph is the presence of an absence, against which the
concreteness of the drama of gender is played out by the male. This probably
refigured an Occidental ideal of domesticity in the opposition of merely phy
ical presence and the real, motivated presence of the male signified by t
sylph's occupation of space and time. He is spatial and temporal while she
only in space and time.
Yet for the ballet corps, the women of generally working-class origin who
typically compose the social body or ensemble of the mise-en-scene, the sug-
gested gender relations of the ballet are played out with male patrons from th
audience. Jowitt sees this rather complex form of sex-work as inscribing its
own fantasy of class mobility onto a terrain reserved for the upper crust. Iron
ically, those women of the corps who married their patrons found the power
their desire shifted from the public site in which consciousness was possible,
even if only as fantasy, to a private situation where even fantasy could be dan
gerous.
The prospect of women exercising the power of their desire, either as spec-
tators or dancers, seems to be denied by the way in which Jowitt frames the
subject of the Orientalist ballet: "The dreamed-up Oriental woman, fired by
passion, was apparently capable of a daring beyond that of the prop

pean lady, and certainly beyond that of the real sultana, whiling awa
hours of her indolent and restricted life" (56). What Jowitt her
"courage and initiative that these Orientalist ballerinas display"
agents of their own desire and defiers of those who wield power ov
in the heroine's resistance to a "tyrannical government figure" in T
Brahma, le dieu et la bayaddre) for the authenticity of freely chose
instead clearly restricted within the male gaze that founds that cour
tiative, as the latter's conditions. The ballerina in her circumscribed
too easily made exceptional to the sexless Occidental woman or the
sultana" of the East, not to mention the possibility that Jowit
intrigued by the Orientalist vision.
If nineteenth-century ballet tended to displace women's labor ons
the prior image of an exotic Other that could not carry the weight o
and hence could not work, the women who inaugurated modern dan
restore this relation of act and meaning. The work of Loie Fuller, I
can, Ruth St. Denis, and Maud Allan provides an image of agency th
viously been denied women on the stage. Yet this very celebration
hands relies on an appropriation of the exotic Other as the source f
that she had identified with the Romantic ballets of the nineteenth
Like the figure of the Orientalist ballerina, the modern dancer Isad
is represented by Jowitt as an originality, a singularity without hist
Jowitt wants to contextualize Duncan's contribution to dance, she instead
appeals to Duncan's essence as a performer to account for the emergent char-
acter of the dancer's work. Her contemporaries, the sources "who were actually
there" upon whom Jowitt relies, were thus moved to present their "responses"
to Duncan, rather than "writing about what she actually did" (69), suggesting
an opposition between a rationalist mode of science and an intuitive mode of
human and cosmological nature. Jowitt applies this opposition to her own his-
toriography. "She evoked an idyllic 'nature,' even as developments in science
and industry were shrinking the countryside, finally stripping poverty of its
last veil, picturesqueness" (70). In her own work, Duncan denies having been
subject to any influence, suggesting her own experience as her only inspira-
tion.
Yet, as Jowitt notes, Duncan had studied the movement systems of Delsarte,
which he claimed represented a fully scientific approach to the body. The prob-
lematic character of any interpretation of Duncan lies in an opposition of
nature and science, conceived of as an obligation of analysis that divides
dance's essential sources from the activity of dancing. Thus the motion of veil-
ing and unveiling, culture/science and nature, is inscribed not merely outside
as Jowitt might suggest, but also on Duncan's body as a body. That is, it both
reveals and is an act hinting at a desire to reveal. The imagery of the veil
receives attention in Jowitt's chapters on Duncan and St. Denis. In the latter
Randy Martin 109
case, the modernist i

roots of Western dance:
Perhaps the most potent image lingering from St. Denis's early-twentieth-
century American Orientalism is that of this idealized self. But to the
modernists who were her pupils, her legacy was not veils and exotic dis-
guises. These they discarded. What they seized on was her conception of
a dance as a vehicle for showing change, rather than for displaying the
status quo, her idea that one didn't end quite as one began. They did not
need the Orient as a pretext. In 1906, seeking a form of personal expres-
sion beyond the parts she was offered in plays and the traditional show-off
roles then open to the dancer, St. Denis had found the East to be a store-
house of guises. These, in their mystery, beauty, theatricality, "otherness,"
facilitated the transmission of ideas that, as Ruth St. Denis, she would not
have known how to convey on stage. Asia was her better self. (147)
In the spectacles of nineteenth-century ballet, the Orient is appropriated in

the service of a single colonizing gaze that disciplines gender, race, and class
in the ballerina's romantic loyalty to the heroic male figure who authorizes her
labor. Modernism psychologizes this appropriation as an interior division of
the self into consciousness and the unconscious. Jowitt writes a myth of mod-
ernist creation where Orientalist content is replaced by an aestheticized self-
appropriation. The external "real" or concrete veil and its hint at a nature
beneath is replaced by an internal territorialization of self, one part of which is
populated by the exotic Other as the labor of the creative process.
Jowitt goes on to write the history of American concert dance (a field that
retains its apparent modernism in the persistent figuration of individual auteurs
as sources of diverse dance styles) through this optic. For example, in the work
of Martha Graham, "Eastern theater" was a source for dances such as Cave of
the Heart and Clytemnestra, but more profoundly, "Orientalisms ... resided in
Graham's muscles" (226). Former Graham dancer Merce Cunningham's use of
chance techniques is interpreted by Jowitt as an affirmation of "the philoso-
phers of the ancient East" (288). Similarly the experimentalists of the 1960s,
"when American interest in Eastern art, philosophy, and culture was escalating
along with the war in Vietnam" (325-26), were drawn to an image of the Ori-
ent absolutely distracted from the conjunctural significance of that image in
United States culture and politics of the Vietnam era.
The point here is not to question Jowitt's assertion of the presence of an
Orientalism within the history of Western concert dance, but to scrutinize the
place of the Orientalist imagination in the service of criticism. It is one thing to
configure creativity by an appeal to the exotic which is also an appeal to a par-
ticular, the irrationality (or the primitive), and quite another to construct a
mythological place called the East as a preserve for these qualities. It elevates
the artist to the status of an eccentric being among Westerners who is uniquely
capable of appropriating the Other as labor power in such a way that it appears
without history and therefore as an executant of a more essential agency. At
the same time, precisely what the artist is in the mastery of the wo
the appropriation of this labor is unclear. The seemingly unnoticed
interest in Eastern thought escalating while Vietnam was being des
war is symptomatic of a persistent refusal to confront the relation b
and power as that of creativity of thought and the labor of manifesti
Jowitt's peculiar anthropological vision, one with certain parallels t
ethnography, denies events their context by deriving the latter from
omy of criticism itself.
Rather than seeking tensions between dance and its world that m
light on the world, Jowitt treats the history of modernity as an eve
theater. Continuity and context deny the critic her moment of abs
ment. To avoid that, dancing is reduced by Jowitt to a moment of es
the critic discovers night after night ("This is not to say that dancin
ter, only that the technical ante has been upped" [369]). In its Orient
dance becomes a refuge for the human from a technological world
with instrumentalism. "Not only does it sometimes propose the hum
native to, and rival of, the computer, it can suggest a hope that hum
will survive in a universe at the edge of destruction" (373). Clear
enormous appeal in this last remark to the fear of being victim to o
sions. Perhaps if one turns to the East in order to, among other thin
effects of the West's destructiveness, then the alternatives and hope
proposes might foreground critical aspects of our own culture.
occur, criticism must begin within history and not against it. T
exchange the false innocence of an originary experience for a s
approach to its own recurrent criteria.
The Structural Autonomy of Dance Practices
A very different sort of dance writing, more visibly self-critical and

fortable with the contemporary theory of representation than any ot
to ethnography, but in a way that attempts to foreground the sub
Barthes's study of Japan, in which he selects features of a "faraway
construct "a system of signification exemplified by a few well-cho
customs and artifacts," to locate an "epistemic foundation utterly fo
West," Susan Foster turns once again to the absolute difference signi
Orient. This time the Orient is invoked not as a series of motifs or as an essen-
tial impulse for appropriation, but to identify a series of tropes that will illumi-
nate the historicizing foundations for dance hitherto unappreciated by dance
analysis. In Reading Dancing Foster remarks, "I am attempting to accomplish
a similar kind of 'ethnography' by isolating and then comparing ... choreo-
graphic projects as discrete cultural systems, systems created from a combina-
tion of what the choreographers have written and said, what has been written
about them, and my own observations and experiences watching their dances
Randy Martin 111
and studying in their t

search of previously unre
uralize' our notions of the
show "how the body and
through participation in
Jowitt's ethnographic
strange each occasion o
instance of the same (the
accomplishes just the opp
different modes of readi
instance is normalized an
dure that accepts four
theory-metaphor, meton
damental relations betw
Hence the elusiveness of
dered into a set of struct
practices. This procedure
text; they can be read in
text, really a commentary
Foster is not aiming to i
present "outlines of para
(259). In this she is conc
dance is appropriated in w
self-constitution of the p
tary. This entails providi
that yield "a sustained, h
work of the improvisatio
as Grand Union or Mered
tice "that reinforces cons
alienation" (260), as evide
At the same time, she r
Foucauldian taxonomy fo
of discursive practice sug
not without its own com
project by showing its re
stages, the arrangement
encourages a diversity of
to have avoided a periodiz
the autonomous periods o
depend on an absolute c
some time in the early tw
ing finality, she yields t
standard.
Her effort to project an isomorphism between the tropes of ch

and those of historiography relies on Hayden White's discussion o
Metahistory. "Following White, I assume that the mode of represe
tropological equation that allows art to represent life-offers the pr
point into each period's epistemological organization" (248). H
White's study of major historiographers of the nineteenth century
to identify the relationship of their selection of tropes to their po
avoids political assessments in all but the reflexive episteme of th
1970s to discriminate between the "conservative" choreograph
Tharp and the "critical" work of Meredith Monk and Grand Union
Within each discursive episteme of metaphor, metonymy, syne
irony, the primary mode of representation identifies both the sign
of a dance form (from conception through performance to interp
its relation to history.
The nature of that relationship may be more precisely expressed a

lows: [Deborah] Hay maintains a metaphorical relation with the R
sance dances by resembling them. [George] Balanchine's relation
eighteenth century is metonymic, or imitative. [Martha] Graha
emblematic of expressionist dance [1890-1950] stands in synecdo
relationship to it. And [Merce] Cunningham retains an ironic dis
from his objectivist descendants. (247)
The isomorphism Foster attributes to literary trope, choreograp

representation, and contemporary and historical choreographic ex
the question of politics in favor of an idealization of epistemes. In t
ment of difference which comprises the aesthetic Foster wants to
the principle of communal practices she sees as responsible for a re
of dance making and viewing cannot be accounted for historically
between the aesthetic autonomy among the different tropes and t
ment of difference necessary to produce community is lost in Fos
work. There is no sense of historical contexts or problems that cho
dancers, and audiences might respond to and emerge within as a c
their work. Rather, the structural characteristic of a period marks
of a given dance work. The very analytic procedure that frees Fos
rize the construction of meaning in a particular work occludes acc
interference between conflicting choreographic or social principle
give dance its historical quality.
Such a procedure does distance itself from the judgmentalist atti
works that Foster justifiably seeks to avoid and allows her to refra
essentialism of asserting boundaries among works. But it do
expense of historical context and the social principles with which
animated. In effect, by beginning with the autonomy of a given ar
sive practice, the emergent character of the work, and hence its hi
acter, is left unaccounted for. She evades the relationship of the w
Randy Martin 113
broader interdiscursiv
As Foster acknowled
Monk and Grand Unio
lectivity. Foster wisel
time. Instead, she imp
not specify conditio
through a radical ref
graphic" procedure) a
society, agency, and h
Alternative Public Sphere
In certain respects, th
ter's studies are famil
together, they show t
refamiliarization lies
The special problems
object that leaves trac
audience, did not, at
unique approaches to
conventions of repres
lenge clear, a critical s
representation and ob
Rather than consider
might examine how
worldly problems. A
ological insights into
history lost to other
problematic in their o
dance activity might
eccentric experience o
familiar activity. Thi
the conjuncture of an
space in the works pr
Banes's study conce
group of performers
Village church.
Perhaps even more im
concerts was the attitu
at as dance; the work
considered a dance, ju
ognizable as theatrica
because they were fra
Taken as suggestive of a general methodological attitude rather

a site for a specific dance activity, Judson becomes a "frame" with
sort of activity can be examined. Unlike either the exoticization of
overparticularization as a separable discourse, here there is a world
miliarized through the writing of dance. This world is indicated b
title, Democracy's Body, which suggests both the virtual soci
could constitute democracy, and the form of agency required to co
virtuality.
While Judson dance itself can be considered a framing device that makes
uncritically accepted activities strange by subjecting them to the perceptual
attention that defines art, Banes attempts to account for how that frame was
constructed. In this regard, her study is relevant to ethnographic activity that is
self-critical about how it identifies and appropriates its field. The participants
in Judson Church were assembled through a choreography workshop given by
Robert Dunn, a composer and accompanist at Merce Cunningham's studio in
the fall of 1960. The course that established Judson was given by a nondancer
at the request of the composer John Cage, whose work with chance composi-
tional techniques provided the basis for the activity of the workshop. Judson
was initiated without any appeal to a dance essence. Instead, appeal was made
to an engagement with already written material, an idea that could be said to
have anticipated poststructuralism.
The writing of dances-the "-graphy" in choreography-was crucial to

the composition process Dunn outlined for his students, not necessarily in
the sense of permanently recording what the dance was, but in order to
objectify the composition process, both by creating nonintuitive choices
and by viewing the total range of possibilities for the dance. (7)
The writing procedure facilitated the appropriation of materials formerly

considered as outside of the scope of dance, thereby creating a distance that led
to an estranging objectivization of materials against the putative experience of
the choreographer as "author." The "author's" task was to reach into the his-
torical vocabulary of dance but not to compose in the sense of regulating the
performance activity. Musical scoring techniques were then brought into the
dance in order to permit a variable range of materials to be written as choreog-
raphy, thereby providing authority for executing the material in performance.
The scores allowed the scarcity of dance space to be a resource rather than a
constraint, since the choreography could be actualized in any space whatso-
ever, including a space occupied by a single individual. Like the Dunn work-
shops, this virtual space resisted any imputation of essence to the performance
of an underlying "dance," since performances were enabled but not dictated by
the choreography. Judson, Banes informs us, was founded on a goal of com-
munity service, and a principle of not "proselytizing in a community that was
primarily Italian Catholic" (36). Its mandate for theater under Minister Al
Randy Martin 115
Carmines was "One

acceptance.. ." (37).
That the church was
1930s and the civil ri
stood as a site of opp
poetry, visual art, the
tic possibilities. The J
ing or inscription in
briefly, by bringing
nonartistic activities
ative principle for da
church that had as it
Banes's appropriation
apparently occurred
discussions associated
Banes's study of Ju
aspects of postmoder
evident in the paro
evening's concert. Th
framing of pedestria
son's maintenance of
of modern dance and
work. Finally, the fra
attack on bourgeois i
Judson's collaborative
critique.
The premise of Judson was to couple a nonhierarchical and participatory
principle, a body politic, with a nonauthoritative compositional process. These
dimensions comprised the democracy that Banes's title imagines as the ulti-
mate project of Judson Church. The chronicle of its breakup displays the outer
boundary of the analytic frame that dance provides and points to the concep-
tions of democracy it claims emerge from avant-garde art. The Judson dance
group grew out of a workshop and remained together for two years. Banes's
account of its demise resonates with other experiences:
Individuals were emerging from the group whose needs were no longer
satisfied by the collective concerts; an influx of new younger participants
made the content of the workshop sessions redundant for the original
group; the somewhat utopian community that had developed over several
years was rent by the conflicts over the out-of-town concerts and, ulti-
mately, over the identity of the group. (209)
Conflicts over the out-of-town concerts both preceded the formation of the
group and were a product of its success. Half-a-dozen of the Judson dancers
were in Merce Cunningham's company, and their employment wit

enced the autonomy of Judson in the same way that any market se
ences, or mediates, the autonomy of the avant-garde. When group
went to Ann Arbor in February 1964 to perform in the Once Fest
divide the payment of nine hundred dollars, the tensions ove
travel and who would remain in New York, and the problem of Jud
the specificity of the "Church" as a site generated a certain amount
ment among the artists. Was this a sacrifice of democracy to the m
Judson's breakup represents a contradiction of participatory
participation. If the democracy produced by Judson yielded to "an
younger participants," or if the presence of Robert Rauschenberg
the later concerts introduced hierarchy, or if accessibility of Judso
those outside the New York community produced conflicts ove
when to perform, it was at the very least a highly exclusive
democracy. In her closing words, Banes seems to accept this ac
movement of innovation in art with a kind of evolutionary confi
the expansion of dance as an art, so much of which had taken place
son Dance Theater workshops and concerts, proliferated" (213). Pro
expansion, growth, but of something that no longer showed even
the democracy that had been, according to Banes, its original proj
is resonant of other experiences. Yet it would be unwise not to ex
in drawing conclusions in order to avoid confusing an analytic fra
make democratic impulses and processes available with an expected
of art from its social context. Otherwise, democracy appears altog
tainable, in life as in art.
Beyond Representation: The Public in History
Judson gave focus to the democratic project implicit in the product

lective appropriation of activity; but it gave equal focus to the cont
ations that inevitably compromised that project and opened the p
nondemocratic alternatives in art. No avant-garde controls the
conditions its production and cannot be assumed to provide a basis
lization beyond its particular audience. The democratic project cou
sustained if the critique of representation in regard to dance wer
porated into performance itself, and if the agency of performanc
expansively extended to include its public, a public that could then
fied with respect to other sites and activities.
These two elements of democratization define the problematic o
Blau's study The Audience. Blau's work is fully suffused with theo
the accompanying challenges to reading such theory implies
adopts in writing the very instability he attributes to audience w
ever, always recuperating the gains of that strategy. Blau conceives
Randy Martin 117
as a kind of social mo
This implies that the
occasioned by the age
That is, in both case
Thus, the audience is
in turn, marks its ow
ence mobilized in hist
the contemporary pu
tarily contained. The
different context; it
Blau's terms, unstable
Because they do not
tion of performance,
slipped into represent
the audience as the m
audience as contained
tion." These analyses
fully realized particip
of public that goes b
ater; and it involves
the production of cu
taries. Blau's theater
ally bridging and ext
Banes construed th
methodological proce
ing more general epi
the frame and assum
the historical aspect
context of its recepti
ing an apology for ar
ating and auto-consu
the name of an oppo
perform.
Such is the predicament of an ethnographic procedure that seeks to contain
rather than display the disruptive potential of that which it represents in analy-
sis. In this regard ethnography, whether in the traditional variant suggested by
Jowitt's work or Foster's affinity with the revisionist versions, is situated
within rather than against the larger historical context of colonialism. While
clearly the colonization of a performance space does not invoke the same polit-
ical forces and effects as other territorial appropriations, the effectiveness of
the methodology developed through dance analysis hinges on the degree to
which it makes available a representational strategy that grasps its own relation
to colonization irrespective of the object. If performance activity is useful in
featuring the resistance to colonization as it represents it, then e

that engages other domains may benefit from an analytic incorpo
performative.
Blau's study can be seen as contributing to an ethnographic pro
highlights the disruptive effects of the exotic Other it "captures
cles" (in Jowitt's terms) through representation. The audience fig
account precisely, and paradoxically, as the indeterminacy of a sp
sentation internal to performance and therefore to its reception, a
ence were both a simulation and a protective membrane of the
theater, history being something that is added after the fact. Hence
"the audience will serve as a heuristic principle for what is not alt
secondary purpose of this book: a reflection upon recent cultural
relation to performance as an activity of cognition" (28).
At issue therefore is not whether theater embodies a significan
the twentieth century. Blau is alert to the limits of its role and claim
most expansive it is a minor art" (379). The issue is how theater d
problematic of representation, agency, and participation as fragile
dialectic. In this regard the mystique of an absolute horizon for the
audience and performance, of democratic participation, has failed
ater as it has in history.
Beyond the specificity of theater, Blau sees the relation of histor
formance as featuring what may be missed at a time when global
cultural commodities approach a hegemonic culture that eclipses n
ater per se, but the forms of immediate community suggested by
live performance. Blau goes on to explain the possible gain of such
prise in the light of the otherwise uncritical assessment of the way
fits into, or even appropriates, its "multinational world,"
which has given us as a by-product a random-access society. S

random is the access that even in the remotest bush unity is dis
rupted and no otherness is protected. While radical economic dif
ferences exist as ever, even widening, the lines are narrowing o
the grid of power, where undeveloped countries are drawn with a
their impoverishment into the porousness of the media. It may n
be what we mean by collective, but here we have another con
stituency-instantly accessed wherever aerials are-the incalcul
ble presence of a spongy mass. (29)
Even under conditions of a globally mediated culture, the unsta

may be said to stand for desire within the narrative of gathering a
ity, which is to say, the desire for self and therefore history. This me
audience as desire must not be confused with consumers as rec
images-and that theater is not adequately modeled by an economic
modities. This is not to say that there is no politics of reception or
of communicative means associated with mass media. On the c
Randy Martin 119
"presence of a spong
suggested by consum
When the audience is
spective of an individ
the promise of futur
demand had been. Th
outside it). Commodif
the self-consumptio
forms is conflated wi
versal wolf, whose a
modities that it con
modities-it at last eat
viewed as a mobilize
enlarges a conceptio
such as that presente
The space colonized b
recognizing it as any
relations of colonization. Such simulation occurs whether or not colonization
is thematized directly and emerges with the commodification of theater itself,

as in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Yet as in any colonizing effort, appropriation
is not without resistance, as Cuban critic Roberto Fernandez Retamar has made
clear in his figuration of Caliban as the unruly response of the Other.6 What
performance can share with history is the sense of an otherness against which
self-identity asserts itself. Without adequate historical reflection, however, this
relation of self and Other can be conceptualized as one of a third world that
reconfigures the colonial self and that self's utopian sense of a sweeping
modernity.
At the same time, performance can stand as the converse of audience,
namely, the desire to place limits on the randomness enforced by corporate
culture's global reach. This is an opposition of performance to audience within
the prefigured unstable audience. When people of what Blau terms the "unde-
veloped countries" (a phrase that only becomes meaningful when applied as an
effect of global relations of exchange, and not, as Blau seems to imply, as sites
for particular kinds of populations) are taken as the concrete manifestation in
geopolitics of the exotica caught and tamed as the context for Western scenic
arts, then more is at stake in his analysis than understanding theater. At the
scene of capture, people are aware of what escapes, and those spectacles of
appropriation translate themselves into the site of an "incalculable presence,"
an unrepresentable actuality in a world that determines historical judgment.
Such linkages have not been lost on those who emerged from the popular
theater in Latin America, like Augusto Boal, whose "invisible theater" insinu-
ates provocateurs or "jokers" in everyday sites where the contingency of the
relations of authority can be staged. In Nicaragua, Alan Bolt has attempted to
efface the boundaries of representation between art and life by joini

with rural renewal.7 In either case the particularized participati
solves in, say, the audience of a dance performance is reinserted by
broader social mobilizations.
The sense in which that participation can be recuperated beyond those set-
tings rests with the possibility of theorizing it as more than simply attendance
at an event. For the work an audience does in performance to have a political
efficacy beyond merely asserting a capacity as a public to mobilize productive
energies without their being wholly reabsorbed by institutional apparatuses,
struggles over the context and configuration of a public sphere must be articu-
lated. But when questions arise as to whether the desire exists for such mobi-
lizations, appreciating this capacity as a resource for politics is itself not polit
ically insignificant.
More concretely, performance, like any other means of gathering a collec-
tivity, cannot exist outside of the social regulation of public space that directly
or indirectly invokes the state. The history of contemporary political perfor-
mance, from the Soviet director Meyerhold to the Living Theater of the 1960s,
is the history of boundaries for participation established as a particular con-
juncture of civil society to the state.8 The point, however, is that if perfor-
mance is an agency that occasions participation, it also limits the scope, if not
the persistence of participation. The agency of performance is distinct from th
one that transforms state or civil society as such, but in either case, such an
agency elicits a desire for further participation.
Blau's critique resonates with the promise that theater will remain a "minor
art" apart from the technological question of its dissemination. If representa-
tion produces a simulacrum of consumption, it also reproduces the desire of
the audience and therefore the impossibility of audience as consumer. Blau's
own dilemma, however, is that he must historicize theater's problem without
eliminating its place in history. If theater recurs because representation cannot
be avoided, is there any way to refigure the relationship between representation
and history without making that relationship a self-absorbing one? Blau grants
theater the obligation of manifesting historical possibility through the dramati
zation of desire. To accomplish this, performance must paradoxically maintain
its distance from the impulse to merge with the audience. Performance must
avoid absorbing audience through a unifying field of participation:
What I have been suggesting through this book, however, is that
whatever the virtues of participation, the virtue of theater remains
in the activity of perception, where participation is kept at a dis-
tance and-though it has come to be thought a vice-representation
has its rites. (381)
The uneasy distance between performers and audience seems intended to
Randy Martin 121
prevent either of the

exotic Other. Here th
agency part company
fruitful than Blau ass
tory of a form" bear
postmodernism usuall
tionfor representatio
the disruptiveness of
tion to the auto-consu
historicist.
Certainly Blau may be correct in recognizing the limits of theater and his-
tory as the point at which the two part company. Yet the point at which they
remain joined, even for Blau, poses issues both methodological and concep-
tual, and perhaps with sufficient complexity that it is not possible to ascertain
the point of disjuncture. If this is true then it would be necessary to act as if
history and performance are in fact the twins of a certain perception-one that
includes participation as the recognition of the work done by any public to
occupy an oppositional sphere. Otherwise one risks both aestheticism and his-
toricism, both at the expense of the subjectivity, agency, that each purports to
conserve.
Certainly, Blau's reading of the commodification schem

tidian for its production of distance and estrangement n
and history. Here the normalization of the exotic, which
accounts of dance that I have discussed, helps sustain the
history in the face of the "vice" of representation. If the
fication, in which Blau places theater, makes theater as w
depend on representation for its own capacity to reappea
refusal by Jowitt, Foster, and Banes to acknowledge that
less has a gain. It allows dancing to appear as an agency w
strangeness of the commodified world, making the latte
by being, as it were, the butt of jokes.
If these writings on dance acknowledged their own resi
had attempted to theorize that resistance, they would ha
the context of self-denial that has been so fruitfully enga
critical theories of representation: the denial of history
and revealing, history. Here a critical dance ethnography w
vention. The analytic frame that a reflection on performa
orizing history in terms of agency depends both on the di
iar that makes the problem of representation unavoidable
that unruly familiar otherness for a world that, from the
achievements, will always insist that the incessant disrup
merely momentary and exotic.
References
Banes, Sally, Democracy's Body (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 19
Blau, Herbert, The Audience (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Pres
Foster, Susan, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary Am
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
Jowitt, Deborah, Time and the Dancing Image (Berkeley: University of Calif
1988).
Notes
I would like to thank Michael E. Brown, George Ytidice, and the rest of the Social Text
editorial board for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
1. This radical notion of history has by now been articulated in many ways. It could be
traced initially to E. P. Thompson's idea of the prepolitical, but certainly was developed by
the reception of such diverse figures as Gramsci, Williams, Foucault, and Bakhtin in this
country. A useful discussion of how these literatures have come together can be found in
Michael E. Brown, The Production of Society (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986).
2. For a programmatic statement see James Clifford's introduction to the volume he
edited with George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 1-26.
3. This concern is shared by other critiques of this revisionist ethnography. See for
example, Lila Abu Lughod, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" Women and Perfor-
mance 9 (1990), 7-27, and is developed with respect to representation more broadly by
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in In Other Worlds (New York: Routledge, 1988).
4. These are rather eccentric choices within the field of performance studies and are
selected for their particular affinity to this project. Jowitt's book distinguishes itself from
the standard dance histories with its use of ethnographic language. Anya Peterson Royce's
The Anthropology of Dance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) and Paul
Spencer, ed., Society and the Dance: The Social Anthropology of Process and Performance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) are good overviews of existing approaches
that do not, however, utilize dance as an object of theory or methodological reformulations.
Similarly, Judith Lynne Hanna, who has written a number of well-researched dance studies,
relies on rather standard applications of survey analysis to evaluate attitudinal responses to
dance in The Performer Audience Connection: Emotion to Metaphor in Dance and Society
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). For a dance ethnography that is alive to many of
the issues in this essay and that seeks to develop dance as an analytic frame for the con-
struction of gender, see Jane K. Cowan, Dance and the Body Politic in Greece (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990). For an ethnographic study that focuses on the contempo-
rary United States, see Cynthia Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and
American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
5. In discussions of dance, Judson Church is seen as having inaugurated the postmodern
moment in dance. Sally Banes' previous work, Terpsichore in Sneakers, 2d ed. (Middle-
town, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987) is the first full-length study of that moment.
Both the discussion and the formulation of postmodernism in dance are distinct from those
typical for other media. The definitions tend to be based on describable aspects of dance per
se, rather than any consideration of the relations of dance production, reception, or aesthet-
ics within a larger cultural conjuncture.
Postmodernism can be applied generationally, as to those, like the Judsonites, who came
"after" modern dance masters like Martha Graham, Alwin Nikolais, Merce Cunningham, or
Paul Taylor, despite the fact that they were, and, with the exception of the late Martha Gra-
ham, remain contemporaries. The term can also be applied to a putative collapse between
twentieth-century ballet and modern dance, despite the fact that the tension between these
styles never represented anything like an opposition between "high" and "popular," or
avant-garde and kitsch (see for example, Susan Manning, "Modernist Dogma and Postmod-
ern Rhetoric: A Response to Sally Banes's Terpsichore in Sneakers," Drama Review 32
Randy Martin 123
(1988). The discussion s

emphasizes the primacy o
thetic dimension, and ult
6. Retamar's essay has
University of Minnesot
mance have been explore
tiations (Berkeley: Univ
(Ithaca: Cornell Universi
7. After his forced exil
at centers in Africa, Eu
cussed in Theater of th
emerged as a critical art
general, suffered with th
Nicaraguan context is di
Theater," Minnesota Re
8. I have discussed the
mance as Political Act (

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Dance Ethnography and the Limits of Representation

Author(s): Randy Martin

This distinction points to a conception of history which joins his

In this regard, ethnographic writing identifies politics where there was

any audience coming

Representing the Object

gests controversy, or a question for the work's sources or condition

Despite her professed sensitivity to context, she produces nothing to offset

A dance critic, attending performances night after night, devises

The game, idly begun, eventually generated this book. The

does the span of tim

very devices of proscenium presentation construct a spectacle of a world dis-

passion, was apparently capable of a daring beyond that of the prop

case, the modernist i

In the spectacles of nineteenth-century ballet, the Orient is appropriated in

The Structural Autonomy of Dance Practices

A very different sort of dance writing, more visibly self-critical and

and studying in their t

Her effort to project an isomorphism between the tropes of ch

The nature of that relationship may be more precisely expressed a

The isomorphism Foster attributes to literary trope, choreograp

Alternative Public Sphere

Taken as suggestive of a general methodological attitude rather

The writing of dances-the "-graphy" in choreography-was crucial to

The writing procedure facilitated the appropriation of materials formerly

Carmines was "One

were in Merce Cunningham's company, and their employment wit

Beyond Representation: The Public in History

Judson gave focus to the democratic project implicit in the product

featuring the resistance to colonization as it represents it, then e

which has given us as a by-product a random-access society. S

Even under conditions of a globally mediated culture, the unsta

is thematized directly and emerges with the commodification of theater itself,

efface the boundaries of representation between art and life by joini

The uneasy distance between performers and audience seems intended to

prevent either of the

Certainly, Blau's reading of the commodification schem

(1988). The discussion s

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